Getting to B (or not to B)

Origins of our Alphabet (2)

The Greek historian Herodotus (5^th century BC) tells an amusing (if hair-raising) story of the earliest known attempt at linguistic research. The Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus, wanting to find out what human beings’ original language might be, conducted an experiment (of the kind for which researchers today wouldn’t receive ethical approval). He had two newborn babies taken from their mothers so that they could be reared by a shepherd among his goats, instructing that no one should speak in their hearing. The aim was to see what words the infants would first utter of their own accord.

At the the age of two, the shepherd reported that the infants approached him when he returned from the fields, uttering the word bekos. On being told that bekos was the Phrygian word for ‘bread’, Psammetichus concluded that the Phrygians (a nation that lived in Asia Minor) must be the oldest of peoples. Ancient Greek commentators drily pointed out that the infants were no doubt influenced by the bleating of sheep: the standard Greek transliteration of that sound was baa as it is today, or bê (pronounced ‘bear’).

At least the word began with the first consonant in the alphabet, B, the letter called beta by the Greeks. A B, alpha-bet. There are various theories about the origins of the letter form B, but the best bet (sorry!) is that it came from a pictogram of a house. How does one represent a house? Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs from around 3000 BC show a simple room plan from above, with a gap for a door:

A ‘proto-Sinaitic’ inscription from Wadi el Hol in Egypt from around 1900 BC shows that this developed into a slightly different plan, perhaps just for ease of writing, or to show an outer courtyard and an enclosed room:

By 1000 BC this is found in the Phoenician alphabet (read from right to left) which was adopted by the Greeks (around 800 BC):

Typically, the Greeks gave geometric balance to the letter by adding a further ‘counter’ (the technical term for an enclosed space), and eventually, when reading from left to right became the norm, turned it around to face the right:         

As with alpha, the Greeks didn’t know what beta meant when they adopted the pictogram from the Phoenician 22-letter writing system. As in today’s Hebrew and Arabic (bayt), it means ‘house’: so Bethlehem in Hebrew means ‘house of bread (lehem)’, while Bethel is ‘house of God (El)’.

Around 700 BC ‘B’ was adopted from Greece (via the Etruscan alphabet) as the formal letter shape for the Roman alphabet. The cursive (everyday handwritten) form b was used in Rome by the 1^st century BC. With its single ‘counter’ it looks remarkably similar (flipped around) to the proto-Sinaitic shape found nearly two thousand years earlier.